Tube terrors: the scourge of the London Underground

Rumours of giant rats and stinking sewers nearly derailed early plans for the London Underground—a pioneering public transport project that now carries more than one billion passengers per year. Rear Vision tracks the runaway success of Charles Pearson's 'trains in drains' concept.

The London Underground, which grew out of Victorian imagination and inventiveness, went on to shape the very physical layout of the city. Today it is essential to the social and economic life of London, carrying more than one billion passengers a year.

Author Mark Mason walked the whole Tube system overground for his book Walk the Lines. He says that the idea to run trains underground grew out of London's perennial problem: congestion.

'We think, like all modern problems, that we invented them, but actually the 19th century had traffic problems too. Okay, they were drawn by horses in those days. London is an old city, lots of it is very narrow streets, so there was a lot of traffic about.'

During the 1830s and '40s, a period that saw the nationwide roll-out of conventional train lines, a man called Charles Pearson had the idea of 'trains in drains'—tunnels underground that the trains could run in. By 1863, the first line was constructed, running between two of the mainline train stations in London—Paddington to Farringdon.

Despite some concerns that Londoners wouldn't use it for fear of giant rats and stinking sewers, the Tube was a success and was profitable from year one. Eventually, as the Tube grew, the six companies operating the lines decided to amalgamate to become 'the Underground'.

'By the first decade of the 20th century what became the Northern line, the Piccadilly line, the Bakerloo line, Metropolitan and District were there, and they started to realise that if they did market themselves as this body called London Underground that it would be beneficial for all and gradually it started to happen,' Mr Mason says.

A huge part of the identity was the Tube map, but as the network grew it became overly complicated. A former Underground employee called Harry Beck had the idea that the the map didn't need to be geographically accurate.

'He took his inspiration from electrical circuit diagrams which are very, very simple, to create the map we know today,' Mr Mason says. 'It's one of the iconic points about the Underground becoming something in people's heads as a system, as an icon, if you like, of London.'

As the city grew in the post war period so did London's transport needs. After World War II the new body incorporating all of London's transport was nationalised and a start was made on electrification, culminating with the the last steam locomotive being decommissioned in 1961.

'Post-war it was really a case of gradually growing,' says Mr Mason. 'The Central line, which is the main one that runs east-west, was extended out into Essex, east of London, to the extent that it is now the longest of all the Tube lines at 46 miles. But a lot of that is above ground.'

The 1960s saw another major addition: the Victoria line running from the south-west to King's Cross in the north-east and beyond.

One of the most significant developments was the extension of the Jubilee line to Stratford in London's East End in 1999.

'They changed its route so that it came down right through the centre of town underneath Trafalgar Square, Westminster, Whitehall, and it joined up to Westminster Tube station, and that was a case there of the real technological breakthroughs,' explains Mr Mason. 'They realised that Westminster Station was very, very shallow, only 15 or 20 feet or so below ground where the actual lines were. When they joined up with the deep level line they realised that if they tunnelled where they wanted to they were going to cause Big Ben to fall over. So they had to inject the ground with tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of concrete to strengthen the ground up. And even then Big Ben tilted by an inch and a half, and is still tilting even now.'

The Jubilee line Tube station is also a modern marvel of engineering with its gargantuan size, Mr Mason says. 'If you took One Canada Square, which for a long time was the tallest building in Europe... you could take that skyscraper and fit it inside the Tube station, lying it on its side.'

And the Tube is still growing, including recent station openings across east London as part of the 2012 Olympic upgrade.

'There's a huge new system called Crossrail, which is going to take several more years to build, which is going right across the middle of London, billions of pounds,' Mr Mason says. 'And although technically that's not part of the Tube, the aim is that at various key points it will join up and you'll be able to join between one system and the other.'

Mr Mason says that the public's resilient enthusiasm for the Tube, particularly after the numerous tragedies on the line, also demonstrates the spirit of Londoners.

'This might sound flippant but London has had disasters and attacks on it for literally 2000 years,' Mr Mason says. 'Londoners famously have "the blitz spirit". There have been fires on the Tube, there have been accidents. I was in London the day that the Tube bombing happened in 2005 and of course it's a horrific news story. It wasn't that we were determined to carry on to beat the terrorists, it was simply that it was just part of London's fabric, London's history, that this sort of thing happens. The Tube is still something that people love using and it's going to take more than a few incidents to cure Londoners' love of their Tube.'